Cycling for a Cause: Fundraising and Friendship in the Fight Against Cancer

Four years in and I am still living with No Evidence of Disease (NED) and I was right, from the moment I received my head & neck cancer diagnosis, I knew cancer was going to change my life.

I was convinced that cancer would make me tougher and maybe it did.

I was convinced that if I made it through my surgery and treatments that I would try to make a difference in others’ lives. Hopefully I have.

I was convinced that I was going to use my cancer journey to change myself and write a different script for the second half of my life. (I was fifty at the time and am shooting for fifty more years.) I’m still working on this and suspect I will be for some time.

What I didn’t suspect was that I would get the opportunity to engage with so many new and incredible people. Had I not gotten cancer I may never have crossed paths with these individuals. From health care providers to strangers donating to my fund raisers, they’ve all affected me in so many positive ways.

As the cycling season winds down, the trees begin to offer up their riots of color and as I roll across the trails on my bike with fallen foliage crunching under my tires, I try to reconnect with why I am here and often come back to it being about the people.

The rest of this post is to share with you a bit more about one of those incredible people, Kam Krull aka Kam-Chow.

Kam’s dad, Brian, has been riding for Team First Descents and raising money for young adults battling cancer for five years so you can imagine this whole fund raising thing took on a new meaning when Kam was diagnosed with cancer.

At this point I think it’s best to hear from Kam herself and the incredible journey she took to get to Leadville this year. So finish up this blog by taking a gander at the video below.

And even though the fund raising is done for this year’s Leadville 100 MTB for Frist Descents, keep an eye out for next year ’cause my hope is that I get to line up again not just with Brain but Kam, too.